Musings on genealogy & family history, mine & others

In Part One, we discovered the wife of Leaming Hawkins Bradley and mother of Sherman Abernethy Bradley to be Mary Simmons. She married Leaming on 19 September 1830 in the Town of Litchfield, Litchfield County, Connecticut. The marriage is in the Barbour Collection of Connecticut Town Vital Records. While that was satisfying, that discovery piqued our curiosity to learn more about her – and hopefully to find her parents and ancestors.

No birth record for Mary is found in the Barbour Collection for the Town of Litchfield so we had to turn to other sources to find her birth place and estimate her birth date. With those details, we hoped to find her parents.

Birth Place and Estimated Birth Year
Mary’s marriage record in the Barbour Collection showed that both she and husband Leaming were “of Litchfield,” meaning the Town of Litchfield, Litchfield County. This seemed to mean that she was born in the Town of Litchfield as well as living there at the time of marriage. That was true for Leaming.

For an estimate of her date of birth, we turned to the 1840 Census, taken on June 1 of that year. The household of Leaming H. Bradley was located that year in the Town of Washington, Litchfield County, immediately southwest of the Town of Litchfield.

The Leaming H. Bradley household was enumerated as follows: two males 5 & under 10 [likely the sons mentioned in the Cutter book, one of them likely Sherman A. Bradley], one male 15 & under 20, one male 30 & under 40 [Leaming, age 32], one female under 5 and one female 20 & under 30 [Leaming’s wife Mary].

Discovering Mary’s Father
When America conducted its first census in 1790, five Simmons households were enumerated in the Town of Litchfield. The households were those of John, Peres, Rufus, Solomon and William Simmons, with William’s surname recorded Simons. I had encountered this fact while transcribing the business journal of Aaron Bradley, Leaming’s grandfather, and finding a few details about each customer. Aaron had a blacksmith shop, tavern and grocery in the Bantam area of the Town of Litchfield, called for a time Bradleyville. Rufus Simmons was a customer in 1795.

Due to this multiplicity of Simmons’ housesholds, I felt I would have a difficult time determining Mary’s parents and ancestors. But I had to try.

With Mary’s birth about 1811 or 1812, I decided to search the 1810 Census for Simmons families in the Town of Litchfield. Remarkably, there was just one: the Job Simmons family with a household as follows: one male 26-44 [Job, 31], two males under 10, one female 45 and over, one female 26 to 44 [likely Job’s wife], and two females under 10. Households recorded adjacent to Job Simmons were those of Chauncey Dennison and Thomas Grannis.

Here certainly were parents of the right age to have a daughter born in 1811 or 1812. Next we turned to the 1820 Census to learn more about this family. In that year, the Job Simmons household was comprised of four men and three women, with two of the people engaged in agriculture. The oldest male and female were each in the 26-44 years old age range, with Job about 41 at the time, the female likely his wife.

And there among the young people in the Job Simmons household in 1820 was one female under 10 who could be Mary Simmons as she would have been about 8 or 9 years old. Job Simmons looked more and more as if he were Mary’s father.

The next challenge would be to try to find her mother, siblings and further ancestors. We’ll take that up in Part Three.